Priorities

Spiritual Articles 屬靈文章 by Rev. Chris Appleby


One of the things you’ll hear if you ever study management is how important it is to get your priorities right. If you don’t set your priorities you’ll find yourself going from one thing to the next without any sense of direction. Particularly in this day of emails and SMS and Facebook type networking we’re bombarded by calls on our time. What are you going to deal with first? What things need to be done right now? How important is that SMS that just beeped on your mobile? Not to mention the phone call that’s ringing at the moment? How good are you at ignoring your mobile when you’re in a meeting? Or do you sneak a look to see if it’s something more important than the meeting you’re in?   

Instant communication is a great aid to our busy lifestyle but it’s also a curse that can interrupt other more important things. 

So what are your priorities? Have you thought them through? Do they vary from day to day?

For Christians one of the questions that often arises is ‘where does God fit on your priority list?’

Is God your first priority? Or are there competing demands on your time and energy? Family? Girlfriend or boyfriend? Husband, wife, children? Work, career, professional development? Sport, leisure, relaxation?

My top priority today is writing this article. Claudia is on my case. I have until the end of June to finish it and that’s tomorrow.  So here I am, head down, concentrating so I can get it finished in time. Oh, but wait a minute, an email just came in, I’ll just have a look and see if it’s important.

…

No it wasn’t really. A couple of junk emails and one from the bishop. But that’s still wasted half an hour, naturally! That doesn’t mean this article isn’t still my top priority you understand, it’s just that once I’d opened the emails I figured I might as well deal with them.

Which of course highlights the difficulty in setting priorities. Saying something is my top priority doesn’t necessarily translate into genuine prioritising. There are always good things that come up to impact on the best thing.

So what does that say about making God our first priority? It says that it may not work. It may in fact lead us into failure. Why? Because to say that God is our first priority says that God is just one of the many influences on our busy lives. That means that we may find ourselves in situations where choosing God may not seem convenient or the best answer. Our second or third priority may seem a better option in the short term.

So how do we avoid such an error? Let me suggest by making God not a priority but the core of our being.  By making God our all in all. 2 Cor 5:15 tells us that Jesus “died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”  Romans 6:18 tells us that having been set free from sin, we have become slaves of righteousness.  The New Testament uses this language of slavery to describe not just our old life of bondage to sin but our new life of obedience to God. The point of being a slave is that you no longer have a choice about how you will live. Your master directs every part of your life. So God is not our first priority; he is our only priority. If he asks us to do something we do it with all our heart.

This has serious implications for our life. If we consider ourselves slaves to God then our professional ambition needs to be made subordinate to God’s will for us. He may want you to give up your career to serve him in some area of full time ministry. Our personal relationships become subject to God’s standards of behaviour – faithfulness in marriage and sexual purity outside of marriage. Kindness, gentleness, patience, self-control, will shape the way we behave towards others. Our response to a consumer society that encourages acquisitiveness will be tempered by God’s desire that we live justly in a world where the vast majority of people live with very little; where 10% of the world’s population uses 90% of its resources. God probably won’t mind if we’re wearing last year’s fashions.

If God is our only priority we’ll gladly put in the time and energy required to see his church grow and people come to faith in Jesus Christ.

Yes, it’s good to set priorities for our life. Without them we’ll be tossed about like a wave at sea blown about by the wind.

But don’t make God one of your priorities. Make him the one who sets everything else in place, the master of your life.

There’s an old prayer from the 16^th century that goes like this:

God be in my head and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes and in my looking;
God be in my mouth and in my speaking;
God be in my heart and in my thinking;
God be at my end and in my departing.

May that be the way we live our lives, with God at the centre of everything we do and think and say.